September 2, 2011

Who's this baby?



Hint:
When I was born my granddad wanted to send a telegram to the president. Both sides of my family were staunch New Deal Democrats, and Granddad was sure that FDR would want to know about the “little stranger” with whom he now had a birthday in common.
After you've answered, click here.

ADDED: Page 29:
I traveled from job to job with one large suitcase, driving a 1949 Chevy for a while. When it had to be junked, I hitched a ride or caught a bus until I managed to buy a ’58 Ford. Living accommodations were never fancy, usually a room in an old hotel or roadside motel....

After work, the guys on the crew would spend considerable time in one of the local bars, ideally a place that would cash our checks or carry a tab until we made our first payday. We consumed vast quantities of beer. If something stronger was called for, we’d drink shots of bourbon with beer chasers—a combination that helps explain how I managed to get arrested twice within a year for driving while under the influence....

And I was sleeping off a hangover in the Rock Springs jail. It had taken a lot to drive the message home, but I realized the morning I woke up in that jail that if I didn’t fundamentally change my ways, I was going to come to a bad end.

107 comments:

MadisonMan said...

Meade?

Scott M said...

Alan Alda.

Meade said...

Dunno but he's absolutely adorable.

ndspinelli said...

Ann althouse

Quaestor said...

I got it! I saw the face of Darth... er... Dick Cheney beneath that baby fat. Am I not awesome, or what?

Writ Small said...

Annikin?

Shouting Thomas said...

After 5-1/2 days, I've finally got power back at my house.

Had no idea, but I guessed a member of the Althouse family.

Now that I know who it is, I would guess that this link will attract in excess of 300 comments as the left screams in outrage over this baby's war crimes and environmental sins.

SPImmortal said...

Dick Cheney was a ladykiller even back then.

chickelit said...

Here comes Dick, he's wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane y'know she's sportin' a chain,
same hair revolution
same build evolution,
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?


Androgynous - The Replacements

David said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
I'm Full of Soup said...

I thought it was Karl Rove.

J said...

Can't be Dick! No horns, or tail.


DC's about Kaput, anyway---artificial heart pump, etc. Not much longer for yr ...Hero

traditionalguy said...

The mouth is a give away. But I guessed none of the above.

Bob_R said...

Got it in one.

Freeman Hunt said...

Ha ha. I thought it looked like Meade too.

Anonymous said...

I got it! I never get these Althouse puzzles.

The book sounds facinating.

I assume that Baby Cheney is wearing a dressing gown in order to cover the set of giant steel balls that he was no doubt born with.

- Lyssa

ricpic said...

Cheney.

chickelit said...

J said...

DC's about Kaput, anyway---artificial heart pump, etc. Not much longer for yr ...Hero



I'll bet Cheney's heart outlasts your artifical penis pump they way you use it.

garage mahal said...

DC's about Kaput, anyway---artificial heart pump, etc. Not much longer for yr ...Hero

Yea Cheney doesn't have a pulse, or a hearbeat. And after his artificial heart pump installation, he still doesn't have either. *rimshot*

True story, he has to be recharged every six hours.

Calypso Facto said...

I thought Rush... but figured he wasn't old enough for the FDR reference.

Anonymous said...

Obama's commie mommy?

bagoh20 said...

The hints didn't help me at all but for some reason I said Cheney as soon as I looked at it. He still looks the same.

Ann Althouse said...

Once you know it's Cheney, that laugh seems eeeeevil.

edutcher said...

And that's the last time the Demos wanted to hear from him.

J said...

Can't be Dick! No horns, or tail.


DC's about Kaput, anyway---artificial heart pump, etc. Not much longer for yr ...Hero


The one thing J got right. Richard B Cheney is an American hero.

And unlike J, all good Americans will mourn the passing of Darth when it comes.

Ann Althouse said...

I don't know why people are guessing me and Meade. We are old, but we weren't born during the FDR administration!

I barely got in on the Truman era, and Meade started with Eisenhower.

The Crack Emcee said...

Alfalfa.

Chuck66 said...

Looks like that little splatch of hair has moved from the top of his head to the sides.

J said...

chickenlil--you trying to write again atheist trash? another mistake. Your daily lies, ugly insults and misrepresentation will just make it worse for you....when you face Judgement Day itself (as Dick will soon).

coketown said...

I enjoyed reading the 24 1-star reviews, nearly all of which admit in the first sentence to having not read the book. Too bad he didn't release the book in 2012 to fire up the liberal base.

J said...

Richard B Cheney is an American hero.

real American heroes don't condone Torture. With that...the hall of authentic US Heroes (starting with Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington) would agree.

Chuck66 said...

Coketown, 15 minutes after an Ann Coulter book comes out, there are dozens of negative reviews by lefties who obviously have not read the book.

Hatred makes people do things like that.

Chuck66 said...

J, so you consider sticking 3 terrorists heads in a toilet to be torture?

What do you think about Barry using torture, along with illegal warrantless domestic spying, to kill a brown skin man in Pakistan?

chickelit said...

Hmm, does J read Trooper York?

How interesting.

Chuck66 said...

J, FDR ordered the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities. He created the atomic bomb the was used to destroy 2 world class cities.

I really doubt he would have been troubled by sticking 3 nazi heads into a toilet.

Trooper York said...

Well Jefferson used to torture his slaves with his very small penis.

Trooper York said...

And Washington used to torture his troops with his breath. You know what a mouthful of rotting wooden teeth smells like?

Think Carol Herman's privates.

Erik Robert Nelson said...

"J, so you consider sticking 3 terrorists heads in a toilet to be torture?"

Apparently he does. But it's situational. If Obama had done it, it would have been necessary and honorable. Like, you know, with Libya.

Trooper York said...

Franklin used to torture his maid by making them take baths with them while he tweaked their robust nipples.

He was the first american tweaker J.

They even showed that on the HBO John Adams show.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I thought it was Meade too.

Trooper York said...

James Madison tortured Dolly because he never wanted to get it in. But since he was so much shorter than her .....he was at her crotch level....and he started the new sport of stand up muff diving....which is usuall credited to Napoleon and Josephine but was really invented by James and Dolly Madison......he wanted to put it in the bill of rights but Hamilton stopped him. That spoil sport.

J said...

Rather ugly and disgusting, even for you York.

Ah Miss Adrianna's people are on to DC's book already:

"Cheney famously told radio host Scott Hennen in 2006 that authorizing waterboarding was "a no-brainer." In his memoir, Cheney cites the views of two former POWs held by the North Vietnamese that waterboarding was "harsh treatment but not torture" as a direct rebuttal to the criticism made of the practice by another former POW, Senator John McCain.

Whether waterboarding is torture is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of law, and waterboarding -- or simulated drowning -- has consistently been treated unambiguously as torture under both international and U.S. jurisprudence.

At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Japanese officials were convicted of torturing captured U.S. pilots by subjecting them to waterboarding.

In 1983 Texas sheriff James Parker, and three of his deputies, waterboarded several suspects in an effort to elicit confessions from them. Parker was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for his actions and the judge presiding over the case described waterboarding unambiguously as torture in her judgment.


Waterboardin'--the All-American way.

Ah the HuffPo Ho!

Carol_Herman said...

Talk about the last word! Nobody thought it would be Dick Cheney's turn at the plate!

Rummy's book, by the way, is FANTASTIC! And, Rumsfeld, himself, reads Known & Unknown!

Chuck66 said...

If the worst thing US POWs in Japan had to deal with was waterboarding, then that was the Club Med of Japanese camps.

More common was starvation. Random shootings. Drinking in the same water you shit in. No shelter during monsoon season. Random beatings. Untreated desease.

And what do you think about Barry using "enhanced interatgation technics" to try to find OBL?

Carol_Herman said...

Cheney defies the statistics for people with end-stage heart disease!

One brave man, is he!

Chuck66 said...

And J, I am sure the families of the 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 are happy that Slick Willie did not use waterboarding or wire tapping in his non-existant war on terror.

Automatic_Wing said...

The outrage over waterboarding is 100% phony, no one would be complaining if Bill Clinton had dunked KSM's head underwater. What a bore.

Chuck66 said...

Mag, correct.

Under President Bush, we stuck 3 admitted mass murderes heads in a toilet in efforts to prevent more killings.

Barry Obama sent missles into the nation of Pakistan to kill a guy who has confessed nor been convicted of any crime.

Yet we hear nothing from the left.

J said...

yr usual desperate non-sequitur Chuckie: were all those subjected to torture involved in 9-11, genius?? No. They couldn't even connect Al Qaida to Saddam Hussein. But don't let like reason and facts stop you.

"Dick Cheney was one of the principal architects of a policy that amounted to torture, and the fact that he is able to boast about this program with impunity is a national scandal.


Paraphrasing...Sam Johnson--patriotism-- usually the first refuge of a scoundrel .

chickelit said...

Yet we hear nothing from the left.

It's because we're not fighting the same war, though we should be.

SteveR said...

I suspected Cheney right off but Rock Springs sealed it.

edutcher said...

Ann Althouse said...

I don't know why people are guessing me and Meade. We are old, ...

No, Madame, you two are younger than Springtime.

J said...

Richard B Cheney is an American hero.

real American heroes don't condone Torture. With that...the hall of authentic US Heroes (starting with Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington) would agree.


It wasn't torture until the America-haters like J needed a straw man to beat Dubya.

A lot of the same people who screamed, "Torture", were the same ones who signed on to it right after 9/11.

But J knows that.

Jenner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jenner said...

No freedom loving American condones torture.

We just have a different idea about what behaviors can be deemed torture. If you think it's simply inflicting discomfort/pain on the body, Shirley you can understand that a lot of things can be condemned as torture, which surely are not.

Is a chokehold torture?

Chuck66 said...

I think Obama's 9.6% umemployment rate is torture.

But I have to commend him on flip flopping on the EPA thing today. That was the correct thing to do.

J said...

A lot of the same people who screamed, "Torture", were the same ones who signed on to it right after 9/11.

who's defending the pro-war Demos, or FISA, PatAct, etc?? Not I, Edu-dimwit. Diane Feinstein and the Clintons... and most leading US Demos should have faced a war crimes tribunal along with Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Rice, Rove, etc.

RigelDog said...

I figured out that it was Dick Cheney...he looks very much the same now.

madAsHell said...

Cheers to Carol Herman!!

She takes a lot of abuse here, but I have yet to see her lash out.

I'm still not going to read anything she writes.

coketown said...

Anyone else imagining a Darth Vader voice when reading the excerpts? Maybe the Imperial March playing softly in the background.

caplight said...

Johnny Cash

MaggotAtBroad&Wall said...

I guessed Ella Fitzgerald. Did I win?

Meade said...

@ MadMan, Freems, and Lem:

Why thank you!

MadisonMan said...

Richard B Cheney is an American hero.

I dislike attributing heroic attributes to politicians.

Meade said...

"I'm still not going to read anything she writes."

You are missing some great comic writing and one of the most interesting characters to hit this blog. But you are quite correct about her being a good sport.

Unknown said...

"Whether waterboarding is torture is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of law, and waterboarding -- or simulated drowning -- has consistently been treated unambiguously as torture under both international and U.S. jurisprudence."

So, are you recommending that all the service members who conducted escape and evasion training for US Air Force, Navy and Marine pilots since 1945 be prosecuted ? Water boarding has been part of that training for as long as I know.

You also demonstrate your ignorance, or the ignorance of the lefty who wrote your talking points, by comparing water boarding with the Japanese "water treatment" which was nothing like water boarding and which consisted of forcing large volumes of water into the stomach of the victim.

You know, you need some new talking points. Those are out of date, except of course for brainless lefties.

Ann, you need a better class of troll.

A. Shmendrik said...

I knew that Cheney was an ABD at Wisconsin (at least I think the dissertation was the only part he didn't complete), but I didn't know we shared a birthday. Always liked the guy. He sure took the correct turn after the DWI's.

Trooper York said...

Anybody who hates baseball must be squashed like a bug.

Jim said...

I'll never understand why parents were putting dresses on their boys back then. I see it in these old pictures all the time and it's just baffling. There's a picture of Gerald Ford as a baby that made me wonder if his name wasn't short for Gerldine.

Pookie Number 2 said...

It was the Crash Test Dummies, not The Replacements.

Ann Althouse said...

Page 359:

Despite the invaluable intelligence we were obtaining through the program of enhanced interrogation, in 2005 there was a move on Capitol Hill, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to end it and require that all U.S. government interrogations be conducted under the rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual. As one of the CIA interrogators explained to me, the Field Manual is adequate for interrogating run-of-the-mill enemy soldiers. “If one guy doesn’t want to talk to you, you can say, fine, and move on to the next, until you get to one who will talk.” But a detainee such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is different. He wasn’t talking, but there was no one comparable to move on to. For the safety of the nation we needed him to talk, and that happened after we put him through the enhanced interrogation program.

In an effort to reach an agreement with Senator McCain and explain to him how damaging his proposed amendment would be, CIA Director Porter Goss and I met with him in a secure conference room at the Capitol and tried to brief him about the program and the critical intelligence we had gained. But John didn’t want to hear what we had to say. We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting. His opinion carried a good deal of weight because he had been a prisoner of war, but his view of the program was certainly not unanimous among his fellow former POWs.

Air Force Colonel Leo Thorsness found out he had been awarded the Medal of Honor while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. The news that he had received the nation’s highest award for valor came to him through tapping on the prison wall. On Memorial Day 2009, Thorsness, who was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese, wrote that waterboarding was “harsh treatment but not torture.” Although a supporter of Senator McCain, he disagrees with him on using enhanced techniques: “I would not hesitate for a second to use enhanced interrogation, including water boarding, if it would save the lives of innocent people.”

Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam, then interrogated and tortured. He managed to escape his prison camp and made it to the Demilitarized Zone, only to be captured again and tortured again. For a time Day shared a cell with McCain, whom he admires, but asked by author Marc Thiessen if he believed waterboarding to be torture, Day replied, “I am a supporter of water boarding. It is not torture. Torture is really hurting someone.” Asked what he would say to the CIA officer who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Day replied, “You did the right thing.”


Cheney, Dick; Cheney, Liz (2011-08-30). In My Time (pp. 359-360). Threshold Editions. Kindle Edition.

J said...

Mike K--looks like reading's a bit beyond your cognitive skills. That quotes's from the linked article from HuffPo, dreck. (2: 17 PST). Dissent really bothers a flagwaving teabug don't it.


Even some repubs are upset at Cheney's memoirs--like Ms Rice, who Cheney called a cry-baby: "It certainly doesn't sound like me, now, does it?" Rice said. "I would never -- I don't remember coming to the vice president tearfully about anything in the entire eight years that I knew him."

He said she said. Given Cheney's record, I suspect he's lying about Ms Rice as well.

Anonymous said...

Mike K said...

"So, are you recommending that all the service members who conducted escape and evasion training for US Air Force, Navy and Marine pilots since 1945 be prosecuted ? Water boarding has been part of that training for as long as I know."

Mike, where are you getting that information from?

chickelit said...

Pookie Number 2 said...
It was the Crash Test Dummies, not The Replacements.

Sorry, but The Replacements got there first.

Please acknowledge and honor priority in the future.

chickelit said...

@J: Cheney said "heads will explode."

I'm cheered to read here that Cheney's book bothers you. That alone gives me hope.

bagoh20 said...

I love it when Althouse calls me "baby".

J said...

Add another brainfart to Chickie's file of daily non sequiturs. The book doesn't bother me, in the least--though some might ask whether any big name politician should be able to profit (greatly) from just boring tell-all memoirs. Maybe he and Dubya should give some of their profits from their potboilers to pay off the debt from the defense spending due to the invasion of Iraq.

Besides, Cheney's getting pounded in the press, even by his former cronies, like Ms Rice. I'm not the hater--that's you and the TP. I pity the man.

grackle said...

Cheney has long been one of one of my favorite public figures. His casual refusal to appear apologetic infuriates the left. Count me as pro-waterboard, especially considering the circumstance that we found ourselves in after 9/11. We needed to find out anything we could about terrorist networks. We still need to but there was a particular urgency during those days. Just like Obama, I count all terrorists as fair game.

Julie C said...

I once sat on a plane next to DIck Cheney (post the first Iraq war and before GWB) when he was at Halliburton. Before the plane took off we were offered drinks (as was the custom in first class in those days - not sure about now) and he had himself a nice scotch on the rocks. He's such a man's man kind of guy. We said very little to one another on the flight but when he was VP I always loved telling my lefty friends my Cheney story because as harmless as it was, just the mention of the man's name caused them to turn beet red with anger. Fun times.

edutcher said...

J said...

A lot of the same people who screamed, "Torture", were the same ones who signed on to it right after 9/11.

who's defending the pro-war Demos, or FISA, PatAct, etc?? Not I, Edu-dimwit. Diane Feinstein and the Clintons... and most leading US Demos should have faced a war crimes tribunal along with Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Rice, Rove, etc.


Well, now we know who Cook turns into when the alternate realities kick in.

Meade said...

"I'm still not going to read anything she writes."

You are missing some great comic writing and one of the most interesting characters to hit this blog. But you are quite correct about her being a good sport.


And she hits the mark more than some would like to imagine.

Carol is an acquired taste, not unlike French fries with French onion dip.

Trooper York said...

I hate the French.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys who come over here to rape our illegal immigrant domestics!

Trooper York said...

We finally got rid of Jerry Lewis....Lets get rid of the French.

Ralph L said...

I'll never understand why parents were putting dresses on their boys back then.
Guess that was standard infant attire before elastic-waist pants were available. I have a photo of my grandfather at age ~5 with long blond curls; but then, his mother had spent time at Dorothea Dix funny farm after losing a daughter.

Cheney impressed me in 1991 when he cancelled one of his own pet projects because it was too expensive for the New World Order. That I'd been wasting money working on it was immaterial.

J said...

As stated in the HuffPo comments, there's a witness box at the Hague waiting for Cheney. Actually make that...defendant box. Now, keep lickin' the boots of yr favorite TP-GOP heroes like a good byatch, Educita.

in your hero Cheney's case--he never served in the US military, tho' waved the flag for 'Nam and Nixon the entire time. No wonder he hates McCain as well.

chickelit said...

You are missing some great comic writing and one of the most interesting characters to hit this blog.

I don't see you much over on Trooper York's, Meade.

You're missing out too.

chickelit said...

J wrote: No wonder he hates McCain as well.

Cheney may have had disagreements with McCain on many issues, but he had the good sense to endorse McCain and Palin back in 2008.

I think passive aggression is just not in his playbook.

Known Unknown said...

The Replacements >>>> Crash Test Dummies.

Don't you know good Minnesotans when you hear them?

Methadras said...

I knew it was Cheney. He's the only guy I've ever heard call his grandfather, grandad.

ken in tx said...

The Japanese did not do water boarding. They forced water into a person until their guts exploded. To call this water boarding is totally false.

Sorin said...

Vice President Chaney is a man among men. A man of steel with a tender heart or maybe “a servants heart”. He is man who loves all the members of his family.
He was raised to be a man back in the day when men were raised to be men and not milquetoasts.
God bless Dick Chaney.

As for Carol Herman, she is a delight, she makes me laugh. She speaks through the mist of time and lays at your feet the ancient gold of the past. She is a good egg.

Palladian said...

"You are missing some great comic writing and one of the most interesting characters to hit this blog."

Some people come to this blog to read people's opinions, not listen to "characters" deliver endless monologues.

I'm glad everyone seems to enjoy these "characters", with their 1000-word allocutions on Cool Whip, but they tend to drive away those of us who just want to participate in a conversation.

It's like being forced to listen to a strolling accordion player perform "Start Me Up" while dining at a bad Italian restaurant, when all you really want to do is share a glass of Chianti and ideas with your friends.

Palladian said...

Of course I'd rather scroll past 10,000 Cool Whip monologues than have to maneuver around the piles of foul, semi-literate, violent, racist and anti-gay droppings left by a functionally retarded, cod-Spanish-speaking Bengt Ekerot.

MrCharlie2 said...

Under FDR Nazi saboteurs WERE hung in the basement of the FBI building, no trails. It was a war.

MrCharlie2 said...

no trials

Calypso Facto said...

Amen, Palladian. To both parts.

This will be the first computer mouse that I'll need to replace the scroll wheel on...

David said...

Eight Nazi spies were landed in the United States in early 1942. They were arrested in late June, tried by a Military Commission and executed on August 8, 1942.

From the FBI web site:

"Shortly after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, four men landed on a beach near Amagansett, Long Island, New York from a German submarine, clad in German uniforms and bringing ashore enough explosives, primers, and incendiaries to support an expected two-year career in the sabotage of American defense-related production. On June 17, 1942, a similar group landed on Ponte Vedra Beach, near Jacksonville, Florida, equipped for a similar career in industrial disruption.

The purpose of the invasions was to strike a major blow for Germany by bringing the violence of war to our home ground through destruction of America's ability to manufacture vital equipment and supplies and transport them to the battlegrounds of Europe; to strike fear into the American civilian population; and to diminish the resolve of the United States to overcome our enemies.

By June 27, 1942, all eight saboteurs had been arrested without having accomplished one act of destruction. Tried before a military commission, they were found guilty. One was sentenced to life imprisonment, another to 30vyears, and six received the death penalty, which was carried out within a few days."

Ralph L said...

IIRC, the saboteurs were discovered because one of them turned himself in to authorities.

Quaestor said...

chickenlittle wrote:
@J: Cheney said "heads will explode." I'm cheered to read here that Cheney's book bothers you. That alone gives me hope

Of course this presupposes there's anything more volatile than mayonnaise inside J's skull.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Knowing that the picture was of a now-prominent American male born on January 30 (shared birthday) during FDR's presidency made it pretty easy to figure out via Wikipedia that it was Dick Cheney. The only other possibilities would be Louis Rukeyser, Marty Balin or Davey Johnson.

Peter

Unknown said...

Never would have guessed it. It sounds like a good story. At his point in life, he is telling it all.

Methadras said...

I admire Cheney very much. The fact that left vilify him as basically Satan only means that he was doing things right. He basically redefined and invigorated the Office of the Vice President like no other Vice President has. In short, he became the model VP and those are big shoes to fill. Fortunately for the current VP, his shoes fit him quite well. The big floppy red kind that go with his big red wig and his big red nose and that big horn he gets to honk every time he goes out into public.

Bartender Cabbie said...

I saw a baby in 1982 that I am pretty sure is the AnitiChrist. I don't think Cheney qualifies.

J said...

Quaestor---

yuk yuk--yr like the dyslexic Schecky Green of Alt-thouse
, aren't you, perp.

The flagwavers also forget the Scooter Libby and Plame scandals, and Libby's job to tell lies to protect his boss Cheney, who also lied about his orders to Libby, with the usual "I don't recall" BS line. Obstruction of justice--no biggy. Cheney barely escaped being prosecuted.

Ann Althouse said...

You can't scroll past a strolling according player. You can stroll past, but not while sitting down. Which was the point, with respect to the chianti and conversation.

Now, if one of our "characters" was yakking loudly at the next table, she'd be like the according player, but she's not.

I love the characters and the conversation, the brilliantly quirky stream of consciousness and the well-structured ideas.

Anonymous said...

His mama dressed him funny. The rest of his life has been a reaction to that girly get up he was burdened with. Yet it worked out wonderfully. Mr. Cheney is one of the greatest political figures of the past 50 years.

Phil 314 said...

Palladian wrote:
while dining at a bad Italian restaurant, when all you really want to do is share a glass of Chianti and ideas with your friends.

Sorry but my mind tends race ahead of my eyes so I was reading that phrase as:

while dining with friends with a nice Chianti and some fava beans (followed by sucking sound)

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Chuck66 said...

“J, FDR ordered the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities. He created the atomic bomb the was used to destroy 2 world class cities.”

“I really doubt he would have been troubled by sticking 3 nazi heads into a toilet.”

Chuck, not sure how this applies to the issue of torture in today’s world. The 1949 Geneva Conventions, which were the result of efforts to decrease the needless suffering of protected persons, were not in effect at the time. The use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a situation regarding the rule of proportionality. Based on the number of casualties experienced during previous invasions of Japanese held South Pacific islands, it was believed at the time U.S. forces would suffer up to a million casualties by directly invading the main islands of Japan.

Additionally, today the DoD spends a significant amount of tax dollars on precision guided weapons and delivery systems to maximize desired effects against the intended targets while minimizing collateral damage and civilian casualties. We want to avoid indiscriminate bombings like those used during WW II and other early wars.